"And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering...." (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

ON THE AIR

Last night, I was lucky enough to participate in a round-table on soaps, hosted by Silas Kain of BlogTalk Radio, with three fantastic women:

Michelle Patrick: A Harvard graduate, Ms. Patrick was a writer at AMC for 19 years. Ms. Patrick also wrote for GH.

Dr. Melissa Scardaville: Melissa was the Guiding Light editor at Soap Opera Digest from 1999-2005. She recently completed her PhD in sociology at Emory University relating to the struggle of aesthetic legitimacy of the soaps.

Sarah Adams: Graduate student at North Dakota State University with a background in History and Mass Communications with an emphasis on Media Studies. She examines the soaps from the eyes of the fans with scholarly perspective.

We ended up discussing everything from the lack of ethnic, cultural, religious and disabled representation on daytime, to the genre's disrespectful treatment in mass media, to actors who believe they were hired to play themselves rather than a character, to the future of soap operas on the Internet and what it would take to revive the serialized drama to its former place of glory.